I have a
secret.
I don’t
consider it an earth-shattering secret. You may even find it not a big deal.
Actually, you probably will feel that way—I understand.
Here it
is: I grew up wanting to be a football kicker.
Don’t
misunderstand—I wouldn’t have traded playing soccer in Argos for anything. I
didn’t want to play soccer instead of football, I wanted to kick footballs in addition to playing soccer.
In my
back yard behind the old two-story brick house in southern Marshall County, we
had a swingset. By the time I came along, the frame of the swing set was a
rusted brown color and the wooden seats were not really safe enough to sit on.
So I used
my creativity to repurpose it.
You see a rusted swingset frame, I see the base structure of a football goal post.
I kicked
every kind of football over that thing—nerf, rawhide, plastic, rubber…all of
them.
There
were no uprights, so it was up to me to determine whether or not the kicks
would have passed between them or not.
It was
part of the daily imagination exercise the backyard offered.
Covering
Warsaw football for the last 20 years, I have seen a lot of kids play out the
dream I had 45 years ago. Harrison and Andrew Mevis are just two examples of
kids who played Warsaw soccer but became football kickers.
I have
admitted to each and every one of them that my envy meter runs into the “red”
in watching and describing on the radio a long and illustrious line of Tiger
soccer players who added football kicker to their athletic resumes, and then
proved to be really good at it.
So you
can imagine how giddy I have been watching the NFL playoffs the last two
weekends.
Kickers
have lined up and drilled field goals to win games and send games to overtime.
It feels like every game has gone down to the final play, and kickers have been
asked to clinch and extend games and they have not disappointed.
Consider
for a moment the kicker for the AFC Champion Cincinnati Bengals, Evan
McPherson.
We’re
talking about a 21 year old kid—a rookie—who has made every kick in every game
in this postseason, including the kick that put the Bengals back in the Super
Bowl for the first time in over three decades.
Being a
kicker on a football team is hard enough.
The rest
of the team spends 59:57 bashing in the skulls of their opponents while getting
their own skulls bashed in, only to rely on someone who doesn’t tackle or get
tackled running onto the field to perform the only task they are asked to do
all week with winning and losing and advancing or not hanging in the balance.
That’s
pressure.
You’ve
heard me talk about “sports courage” and “real courage” before, but this is
pressure is as real as any pressure there is.
If you
miss this kick, you lose the confidence of your current bosses and most future
bosses. Keeping a job gets harder. Getting a job with a new team gets harder.
Walking
into the locker room with 52 other guys you just let down after they gave
everything they had for perhaps the only chance they will ever get to play on
the biggest stage would be impossible.
There
have been efforts made by people pretending to be friends of football to
diminish or to eliminate kickers from the game of football.
But, the
truth is, it can’t be done.
As macho
and tough as football is, let no one ever forget that every football game begin
with a kick, and a lot of them in this postseason have ended with a kick.
And while
that will never be me being lifted into the air after sending my team to the
Super Bowl with a game-winning, drama-drenched swing of my leg, it does put a
smile on my face to think about all those game-winning
kicks I made over that swing set frame in my backyard all those years ago.